dispatches

The last professional lab in Seattle

It was inevitable, but Ivey-Seright, the last major professional film processing lab in Seattle has closed. The Post-Intelligencer has details here.  They have been the major photo lab in the Seattle photography scene for over 30 years.

There was a time when it was almost a daily ritual to drop by the lab (which is next door to Glazers, the pro photo supply house) to deposit or pick up film, and to chat with the other photographers doing the same. Ivey was the kitchen of the photography community. We all intersected there. One of the impacts of digital is that we are a less cohesive photography community, because there is no place where we  congregate anymore in the course of our daily lives. We now work, isolated, in front of our computer screens.

Panda Lab, the last lab standing, is going to pick up the slack. They have been the quality black and white custom house for 20 years, but a lot of people don't know that they have C-41 and E-6 capability too (the P-I article is wrong in that regard). They don't do E-6 sheet film however, so now there is no place locally for the large format shooters to have their film processed.

I have history with Panda, going back before their inception, when I worked with Dana and Mary at Moonphoto. It was my first job in Seattle, back in 1985, working in the darkroom as a black and white printer. They bought my Omega B-22 enlarger from me when they left to start their own lab. When assisting gigs ran dry, I could always count on a week or two working for them at Panda so I could pay my bills.

To this day, they are the only lab I still use when I shoot the occasional black and white roll. They also get all my wedding proof business (from my digital files), as they really take care to make them look great.

Professional photography in its analogue form is now a niche, intimate environment. The personal attention that a small, closely held business like Panda can give is going to be the new template. Film is not going to go away, and there will always be a need for an infrastructure to service those practitioners. Panda is well placed in every regard for this new environment.

California on fire

The day of the wedding dawned wet. Throughout the morning thunder grumbled through the mountains. Most of the guests stayed huddled under eaves and out of the rain, though one group went ahead with a hike to a swimming lake. “We got to the lake, and BOOM. We didn't go in.”

The sun came out in time for the ceremony, and everything was beautiful. But the line of storms set off over 800 fires across California. There are 137 fires in the Mt Shasta-Trinity National Forest alone.

These are from our drive. At one point along Hwy 299 we could see five separate blazes.

What's with that naked man?

Yes, there is a story behind the 20 June Daily Photo.

We're at the outdoor dining table during a wedding weekend that I'm photographing. We're at a remote lodge in the Trinity Alps of northern California. Both the groom and bride are snowboarders and gnarly outdoor types, as are many of their friends at the wedding.

“Turn around, there's a naked man!” says Robin. I take off after him, with the camera. People are cheering, and it's partly directed at me. I'm twice the age of the streaker, and I'm gaining on him.

Apparently, there's a tradition with this group of friends who lived in a house together. Whoever loses whatever game is at play has to do a naked lap around the outside of the house. This naked man lost the horseshoe tournament, which is when I caught up with him lapping the camping area.

On vacation

Robin and I are driving around northern California and back up the Oregon coast for the rest of the week. Watch the vacation Flickr stream to see what we've been up to.

Krappy kamera fun

I made a point to not take a camera to my wife's uncle's retirement party, as I didn't want to get roped into being the official photo geek. But the light washing across the Chinese food debris was compelling. I had my iPhone. It has a camera in it.

The quality of the iPhone camera is so bad that it falls into the "art" camera category (Holga, Lensbaby, et. al.).  Compelling images can be made with little effort, because of the instant "weird" gauze. I don't know if I'm proud of these photos, as it brings up the issue of what made the aesthetic decision here. Not me. The camera's quirks dominate the visual field. But then again, it's like any other tool used to mediate reality--you become conversant in the way your tool converts reality into something else, and learn to manipulate that to some other end. Conventional, straight photography is no less artificial a window through which to perceive reality. We just have a more widespread convention that "this" is what a photograph looks like. And now, we have this other "this" available in millions of hands: our cell phones.

Like, here's my theory of artmaking

I started to respond to Romanlily's comment on yesterday's entry about the Daily blog, and I discovered I had a subject for today. Which is, how much effort does this daily discipline of finding a photo to post actually entail? You know, not much at all. If I haven't done or been anyplace particularly interesting, I have the garden. It's the default subject. I can pop out there, any time of day (usually I'm ready for a break mid to late afternoon from whatever else I've been doing, usually at a computer), in any weather, and find something. For one week, all I did were the tulips. Lately, the Japanese maple out back has been particularly productive. It's a time when I can dive into the Zone, connect with where I'm standing, and find a photograph.

I like to pretend that I'm searching for something that I haven't seen before. It's totally not true, most of the time. I'm going to be sensitive to a particular arrangement of reality that has sparked the impulse in the past, and will probably continue to do so until I exhaust whatever vein I'm mining. You can look through the archive of Daily Photos and see that I have a regular way of solving the box-around-reality issue that I return to again and again. In a way, and especially for us guys who are making a livelihood from our eye, we have only so many pictures in us that we make again and again. We're whacking away at the same problem in the same way, because we know what works. And because we need to keep at it, for whatever reason. The picture's not done.

A measure of creative growth is how that picture we keep whacking away at changes over time. Part of the benefit of the daily discipline is that, hopefully, I'll have to change that picture sooner rather than later, because I'll get bored with it sooner. I'll want more complexity, or my internal life has changed to the point where I need a new image to make sense of it, or maybe it works the other way around and the need to find that new picture is going to make me respond to my life issues in a different way. There are photographs I used to do a lot that I don't need to make anymore. I'm not the same person I was five or ten years ago. It's pointless to parse out which drives what, because of course creativity and growth aren't limited to the output of an expressive pursuit. My life moves forward with greater awareness and depth because at the core of it is this commitment to a creative engagement with my surroundings.

Daily's Birthday--3 years

Today is a milestone: Three years of uninterrupted posts on Daily, my Photo-a-Day blog. Here is the post from 8 June 2005, the only day I missed posting a photograph, and where I explained my intent.

The Daily Photo is my visual diary. The discipline is to take a photo a day and post it within 24 hours, wifi access permitting. My intention is for the sequence to be mysterious, to form its own narrative, structured only by the accident of chronology, without words or context.

Total Daily posts now: 1,127.

More iPhone calendar capers

I showed up for my dentist appointment at 10:15 this morning, only to find out it was really at 1:15 pm. I thought I had fixed all my shifted appointments after my last sync across time zones, but I missed this one. The receptionist said, "You know, the last person in here this happened to had an iPhone too."

Summoned

There is a letter we all dread receiving, the one marked in capital blue letters, “Jury Summons.” I've had several in my time. In Washington State, it's generally no problem to plead self-employment and get out of the fix.

But I've always felt a certain amount of civic guilt at begging out of such a basic task of citizenship, so I asked the scheduler at the Municipal Court, “Can I put this off until summer, after my busy season?”

Not a problem. I think they're grateful for anyone who doesn't immediate try and squirrel out of the responsibility. It gave me the warm fuzzies yesterday to report for jury duty. I was ready to participate  in a basic bedrock task of democracy.

Seattle has a shiny new Municipal Court building, and a plush, top floor jury pool room for us to wait in. There are comfy chairs, free coffee, wi-fi and land line phones, four computers, and floor to ceiling windows on two sides for a stunning view of the waterfront.

But after two novels, two newspapers and a crossword puzzle, the novelty had long since wore off. Two juries were empaneled in the morning, taking about two-thirds of the room. I was a leftover. The afternoon came, and the warm civic fuzzies were long gone. By the time we were were dismissed, 7 hours later, I felt mostly like I had been in high school for the day, specifically, in study hall detention. I had done something bad. I couldn't leave without a hall pass, but now my sentence was up.

Postscript. Last night my back hurt like it hasn't in weeks. The sedentary life doesn't fit me well at all. When I arrived this morning, I said, “You know, I'm really in pain.” “Are you asking for a dismissal?” “I suppose I am.”

We discussed the ergonomic issues at her desk (“They did an assessment, but said it will be two months before I get anything”) and then I was free. 

Why video?

I am immersed in editing my footage from a dance camp I went to at the end of March. My intention is to make a five to eight minute documentary. I am having to learn Final Cut, yet again.

So why am I putting myself through this pain? It's because I am completely captivated by the storytelling capabilities of video. A still photograph exists as a discrete object, to be made meaningful by the context of presentation and the readiness of the viewer to be moved by this object, the photograph. Yet viewing a photograph can just as easily be a disposable moment, like we do with so many images in the media. Video, once you make the commitment to watch the thing, takes you for a ride. It is multi-sensory and, when well crafted, both invisible and potent in the immersive reality of the moment. It's much bigger than a still image.

I learn mostly by doing, but I need an example to follow. Final Cut is way too complex to learn by stumbling. I am a reader, and books are how I tend to learn most new technology.  I also have a free month's subscription for Lynda.com (from registering CS3), and I've been working through Larry Jordan's FCP 6 series. But I don't like the tyranny of the video format for learning something (ironic, isn't it), and I want a physical book with an index, and with corners I can dog ear to mark those sections that I want to look back at again when I get stuck.

So I sat at Barnes and Noble the other day, comparing books, bought one only to discover it was for a version several years outdated, returned that one, and then went to the University Bookstore. The way I shop for books of this sort is look up one thing on how to do something (like, how to make a Ripple Cut), and compare how each of the books tells me how to do it. The one that puts it in a way that makes is understand it is the one I get. In this case, it was two books from Focal Press, “Final Cut Pro Workflows (Osder & Carman), which is giving me a much needed background on video technology and terminology, and “Final Cut Pro 6—For Digital Video Editors Only” (Watson).

My goal is, by the end of the summer, to call myself something of a professional at this, and add it to what I do for a living.